In this connexion, I must also refer to the Catholic confessional, about which of late years a good deal has been written. I may recall the disquisitions on the moral teaching of Liguori. The father confessors have to read books in which are discussed the questions of casuistry with which they have to deal, in order to learn what authoritative decisions have been given regarding the concrete cases on which they are asked to pass judgment. In these books, sexual misconduct plays a leading part. This is also true of the confessional manuals written to assist the penitents in the discovery of their sins, in which sexual errors also find a place. Opinions as to the wisdom of giving such manuals to penitents are certainly very divergent. When we read the authoritative decisions, for the use of confessors, pronounced by Catholic theologians upon sexual faults, we are sometimes astonished at the practical insight displayed in these decisions; the opinions expressed must, indeed, often appear dubious to the strict moralist, and yet they are occasionally marvellously well adapted to the practical requirements of the case. In many instances, however, even this cannot be admitted; and however right from the practical point of view the decisions may sometimes be, we must not overlook the dangers of the confessional. Cases have been personally known to me in which, at the confessional, penitents have been cross-questioned in such a way about sexual details that unfavourable consequences were, in my opinion, extremely likely to ensue. This statement applies with equal force to the case of children, who have to go to confession as soon as they arrive at the "age of reason."[141] No one will dispute the assertion that the father-confessors gather much experience in the exercise of their profession, and that most of them possess sufficient tact to avoid asking improper questions. But to assert this of all of them would be to rush to the other extreme; and for the same reason that in the latter part of this chapter I shall express myself as opposed, at any rate in part, to sexual instruction in schools, do I think that to ask such questions of children as are sometimes asked in confession, may in certain circumstances lead to very undesirable results. When the child penitent describes to the confessor sexual faults (masturbation, &c.), however well intentioned the words of the confessor may be, it is impossible that they should be so individually adapted as is really necessary in such cases; and the detailed discussion of these matters which sometimes follows is open to grave objection. In what I have just said, it is far from my intention to attack one of the sacraments of the Catholic Church; but the matter is one to which it was necessary to allude, and I will merely add that the error must be avoided of taking as a basis for criticism much that is written with a party bias against the Catholic Church, and much also of the mockery of the confessional